HPC NEWS

Three-way collaboration for HLRN supercomputer

Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB), a research institute for applied mathematics and computer science, will use DataDirect Networks (DDN) in partnership with Cray as the foundation for its big data analytics and scientific research infrastructure for the HLRN supercomputer.

ZIB will use DDN technology to perform massive scientific simulations, mathematical computations and analytics to accelerate research spanning the fields of physics, chemistry, fluid dynamics, engineering and the environment.

With research driven by the principle of 'Math, Computation and Data at Work', ZIB supports scientific projects conducted by several hundred academic and government researchers who share access to distributed supercomputing resources in Berlin and Hannover, Germany, as part of the HLRN alliance.

Given the range of data intensive applications and concurrent computations performed by the institute, HLRN required a big data solution that could deliver a significant increase in storage capacity, and also scale bandwidth and performance of its storage seamlessly. According to ZIB, DDN’s HPC portfolio, including the SFA12K storage platform and GRIDScaler Parallel File Storage Appliance, outperformed competitive solutions in I/O price/performance ratio.

HLRN applications will be able to achieve an overall aggregate bandwidth performance of more than 50 gigabytes per second, which will represent a 3.6x improvement in performance over its previously deployed system.